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by whimsicalism 652 days ago
this paper is far from “showing this definitively”

even if we bought this negative result as somehow “proving impossibility”, i’m not convinced plasticity is necessary for intelligence

huge respect for richard sutton though
1 comments
aithrowaway1987 652 days ago
Isn't "plasticity is not necessary for intelligence" just defining intelligence downwards? It seems like you want to restrict "intelligence" to static knowledge and (apparent) short-term cleverness, but being able to make long-term observation and judgements about a changing world is a necessary component of intelligence in vertebrates. Why exclude that from consideration?

More specifically: it is highly implausible that an AI system could learn to improve itself beyond human capability if it does not have long-term plasticity: how would it be able to reflect upon and extend its discoveries if it's not able to learn new things during its operation?

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scarmig 652 days ago
Anterograde amnesia is a significant disruption of plasticity, and yet people who have it are still intelligent.

(That said, I agree plasticity is key to the most powerful systems. A human race with anterograde amnesia would have long ago gone extinct.)

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sebastiennight 651 days ago
Let's not forget that software has one significant advantage over humans: versioning.

If I'm a human tasked with editing video (which is the field my startup[0] is in) and a completely new video format comes in, I need the long term plasticity to learn how to use it so I can perform my work.

If a sufficiently intelligent version of our AI model is tasked with editing these videos, and a completely new video format comes in, it does not need to learn to handle it. Not if this model is smart enough to iterate a new model that can handle it.

The new skills and knowledge do not need to be encoded in "the self" when you are a bunch of bytes that can build your successor out of more bytes.

Or, in popular culture terms, the last 30 seconds of this Age of Ultron clip[1].

[0]: https://www.onetake.ai

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA5wYcybkCM&t=25

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